Significant, and usually unwelcome, surprises, such as floods, financial crisis, epileptic seizures, or material rupture, are the topics of Extreme Events in Nature and Society. The book, authored by foremost experts in these fields, reveals unifying and distinguishing features of extreme events, including problems of understanding and modelling their origin, spatial and temporal extension, and potential impact. The chapters converge towards the difficult problem of anticipation: forecasting the event and proposing measures to moderate or prevent it. Extreme Events in Nature and Society will...

This book is more than a standard proceedings volume, although it is an almost direct result of the workshop on "Nonlinear Analysis of Physiologi cal Time Series" held in Freital near Dresden, Germany, in October 1995. The idea of the meeting was, as for previous meetings devoted to related topics, such as the conference on dynamical diseases held near Montreal in February 1994 (see CHAOS Vol. 5(1), 1995), to bring together experts on the techniques of nonlinear analysis and the theory of chaos and applicants from the most fascinating field where such methods could potentially be useful: the...